Have you heard of the indispensability argument? What about the "no-miracle argument"? Do you know what the "Twin Earth" means? What is the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis? Do you know the best philosophical argument for computational functionalism? Do you think that quantum mechanics forces us to give up classical logic? Even if you have not heard of these philosophical issues, it is almost sure that sometimes during your formative years in analytic philosophy you had some philosophical contact with Putnam's ideas—or more correct, Putnams, i.e. different views of Hilary Putman during the more than six decades of contributions to philosophy. The volume edited by M. de Caro and D. Macarthur is a collection of papers written from 1997 to 2012, the last one in a series of collections of essays by Putnam (most recent collections include Words and Life and The Collapse of the Fact/value Dichotomy and Other Essays both with Harvard University Press). Out of the 36 chapters (each being a separate paper), ten chapters were previously unpublished, two were substantially modified and the rest of them are reprinted versions of previously published materials. Similar to other collections of essays (e.g. Words and Life, 1995), in the present volume Putnam reveals his most recent views on a variety of topics: philosophy of science, especially physics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, philosophy of logic and mathematics, meta-ethics and applied ethics, history of contemporary philosophy and last but not least, philosophy of language and epistemology. The volume has six parts: (1) On the relation between philosophy and science; (2) "Mathematics and Logic"; (3) Values and Ethics; (4) Wittgenstein: Pro and Con"; (5) "The problem of Pathos and Skepticism" and (6) "Experience and Mind".

The editors trace these impressive number of topics in some patterns of thoughts in Putnam's work of the last two decades or so: (a) the criticism against the logical positivists and against Quine, (b) realism about rational normativity (c) antiessentialism about truth, language, meaning, reference, knowledge, reason, and moral goodness (d) reconciliation of facts and values and (e) the reconciliation between reductive naturalism realism and liberal naturalism. The editors claim that these patterns help us navigate the numerous changes of perspective in Putnam, sometimes radical, sometimes only a matter of nuances and warn us that Putnam belongs to the category of contemporary philosophers who have changed their perspective several times (Wittgenstein, Carnap and probably Heidegger are the most illustrious examples). Reading Putnam is an adventure in following different 'Putnams' and the intricate relationships among them. Putnam's own view of philosophy is similar to a "fallible democratic experimentalism" in which virtually everything is under scrutiny, including one's own previously perspectives. Putman has always acknowledged that there are experiments in philosophy, in a Deweyan sense, and that new insights, new perspectives are always possible and needed in philosophy. For Putnam, "there are no last words in philosophy" and tasks in philosophy are never completed (p. 3). The shifts in his philosophical views are not only self-criticism, but a form of experimentalism in philosophical evolution, and not loose parts of a philosophical "system". I believe this is the best way of reading Putnam, as a pragmatic experimentalist with philosophy, and not as a contemporary "systematic" philosopher.

For somebody familiarized with his previous work, almost all papers in the present collection add something new or constitute a novel approach to problems that Putnam has delved into since the 1960s. Putnam reflects here again on some topics on which he wrote more than half a century ago by the way of two main strategies: addressing criticisms coming from philosophers (for example Y. Ben-Menahem's on "internal realism" or A. Fine and A. Mueller's attack on the two forms of realisms in Ch. 4) or revisiting his own view in the light of new results in science or technology (see Ch 6-8, 14 and 35). In this sense, it worth noting that Putnam was a pioneer in the philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics (see Ch. 6: A Philosopher looks at quantum mechanics (again), original paper published in 1965), the setup of the original indispensability argument of mathematics (papers written in the late 1960s) and the functionalism about mind (in Ch. 35 he explains why he gave up it up this positino). By contrast, parts 4 and 5 constitute almost entirely internal work in philosophy: Putnam attempts to "rescue Wittgenstein from his interpreters" and attacks several forms of philosophical skepticism (mainly B. Stroud's and P. Strawson's).

The overarching perspective of this volume and my main focus in this review is unveiled by its title: the relevance of humanities in an age dominated by science and technology. By overcoming the fact/value distinction of the positivists, Putnam argues for the central role philosophy must play for sciences in the time of academic specialization and fragmentation of the intellectual world. In the last decades, Putnam argued against a bare (scientific) naturalism by promoting the "liberal naturalism" in which nonscientific understanding and knowledge have a role to play as alternatives to the scientific worldview. Another theme Putman is interested in is the rejection of any form of scientism, understood as a conceptual collapse of philosophy into science. Philosophy should not renounce its theoretical face (to know how all "hangs together", mainly the metaphysics and epistemology) and its moral face. First, philosophy is involved with understanding and interpreting quantum mechanics, cosmology, quantum gravity (p. 45-6). Second, by taking a pragmatist stance, Putnam claims that all scientists use value-judgments and more generally that "knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values" (p. 47). Facts, values and theories are all entangled in science, philosophy or everyday life. Any scientific discipline is like a "three-legged stool—all legs are needed or it falls over".

Chapter 2, unwittingly called "From quantum mechanics to ethics and back", is probably the newest material, but has almost nothing to do with quantum mechanics, ethics and with anything in between. It plays a central role in the economy of the collection, as here Putnam explains the 'history' of "internal realism" (a form of antirealism, the "antithesis of 'metaphysical realism'") used in the 1970s in two inconsistent sense (p. 96) and the confusion with scientific realism and metaphysical realism (these terms are used throughout the volume in a more or less standard meaning). Metaphysical realism for Putnam of the 1970s was the conjunction of rejecting verificationism and the denial of conceptual relativity. Nowadays (Ch. 4, "On not writing off scientific realism") Putnam declares himself a metaphysical realism, but with conceptual relativity added (p. 101). Putnam clarifies in what sense conceptual relativity is compatible with metaphysical realism (p. 57-62) and admits that he is "not unhappy to be described as a pragmatist", but without the pragmatist theory of truth. After the mid-2000s, Putnam came back to the idea of metaphysical realism and endorsed the idea of a "metaphysical realism" aided by a semantic vocabulary: there is no pure realism-antirealism debate, voided of semantic issues and truth. He does not reject any form of metaphysics as logical positivists and Wittgenstein did, although he opposed the monistic metaphysical realism. For Putnam, (Ch 2) any discussion on realism needs to address conceptual relativity.

In respect of the scientific realism, Putnam always endorsed it by denying various forms of antirealism about the theoretical entities posited in science: fictionalism and positivistic instrumentalism or any form of operationalism. The existence of electrons is mind-independent: he clarifies that the no-miracle argument was targeted against various forms of operationalism and instrumentalism with respect of scientific theories, and against antirealism about truth (p. 97).

I want to reflect of a little bit on Putnam recent work on quantum mechanics. Since 1965 the area of interpreting quantum mechanics has changed radically. Putnam rejected the operationalist point of view about quantum mechanics. He defended and still defends a form of scientific realism about the quantum theory. The "new looks" at quantum mechanics (2005, 2011 and 2012, see Chs. 6, 7 and 8) are exceptionally well documented and admirably accurate. Here we see Putnam rejecting his early view that quantum mechanics needs a new type of logic advocated in the early 1970s (Ch 8), weighing the pros and cons of the four interpretations of quantum mechanics: Bohr, the many-worlds (Everett-DeWitt), Bohm, and GRW (Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber) interpretation, and finally taking sides in respect of them: "either GRW or some successor, or else Bohm or some successor is the correct interpretation" (p. 145). In Ch. 7 Putnam reflects on the ontology of quantum mechanics in the light of a recent issue of a prestigious physics journal (Journal of Physics A, vol. 40, no. 12, 2007) called "The Quantum Universe" with contribution by leading physicists and philosophers. The recent results by R. Tumulka (his papers are available in the aforementioned journal and on the arhive arxiv http://arxiv.org) may slightly favor GRW over Bohm's interpretation. But a new collaborative work with D. Albert has the precise aim to show that no interpretation of quantum mechanics can be fully Lorentz invariant (p. 176).

Moving now to philosophy of mind, one can witness in time Putnam's recantation of traditional functionalism (starting with Representation and Reality, 1983). Putnam retains now a watered down form of functionalism in the philosophy of mind, but gives us both its reductionist and computational requirements (the latter is the idea that mental states can be identified with computational states). In its new incarnation, the "liberal functionalism" becomes antireductionist because it is "environment involving" (the meaning of words used by the brain depend on our relation to the world, a culture or a physical environment, see p. 614). The functionalist cannot represent the functional capacities of the brain without going outside the organism's "brain" (p. 83) and that the capacities are not described anymore as abilities to compute only. But this is an empirical thesis, and not an a priori theses (as he charges now functionalism with, p. 616). Finally inspired by the liberal functionalism, Putnam introduces in his philosophy of perception the concept of "transactionalism", a forthcoming collaborative work with Hilla Jacobson): what we perceive depends on a transaction between ourselves and the environment (p. 635-37).

One final word about the impact this collection may have: it is hard to believe that there are many philosophers who could follow in detail all the work of Putnam. Philosophy is increasingly fragmented and specialized and a Renaissance philosopher like Putnam is rara avis. A question can be raised: how coherent are the views exposed here? What is the cement of all this impressive work? How much of Putnam's position (or positions, for that matter of fact) in philosophy of mind is relevant to his stance in respect of the interpretation of quantum mechanics or vice versa? How does his anti-skepticism mesh with his more recent liberal positions on realism? And finally, the question about being a realist: can we maintain the same form of scientific realism of metaphysical realism over the borders between sciences? Is one realist in the same way in quantum mechanics or in cognitive science? Probably Putnam would endorse a uniform approach, but skepticism about the "one-size-fits-all" realism is rapidly growing among philosophers of science.

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